tibiotarsus:
In reply to steelsmiter (msg # 10):
Maybe? I am confused by your distribution of negatives, but I think you successfully stated outright one reason your game was different to other horror games; next time the "why this and not the other?" kind of question comes up, that's what they want.
I'm confused by this. Something about it isn't parsing
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If they keep asking, give more reasons,
They usually don't.
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and if you run out then ask what they're looking for
I don't how that's useful in a thread where we're all pitching our ideas, it should be that if your thread drew their interest it should by definintion be something along the lines of what they are looking for. And the reason I've written 5 games is that games aren't usually what I'm looking for (which obviously varies by a pretty significant amount.)
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so you can say something in the range of "it is like that, in this way [how it is like]" or "this is not a game you'd like, thank you for your interest and farewell".
I usually reserve that for the RTJ process. But there's another problem with that in that if I've gotten to the RTJ process it's because people expressed interest, and whoopsie, turns out they weren't after all. Sometimes it's me for sure. I can't skimp on precise expressions of intent and detail. It can be a bit much I know.
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All right, then imagine the same thing, but with something that does fit your culture.
I'm sure that's all well and good for neurotypicals but considering the inapplicability of the example it ruins the whole venture.
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I was just thinking of a food that can have many variations and look dubious/come in a closed container. Maybe you're fortunate enough to like absolutely everything and have no physical, voluntary or religious dietary restrictions, but you can grasp the idea that other people do have specific tastes and needs, I think.
No I don't get how the situations relate at all, and this makes it worse because that's a microcosmic concern over a macrocosmic problem. Individuals with the issues mentioned in this snippet don't affect the overall reception of any food served at any communal eating situation I've ever been to. It is not the same for the fact that all the dishes to get consumed and that's equivocated to none of the games getting played.
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Being explicit in checks about why you made the thing will help get it to its audience,
I'm literally (and I don't mean that in the figurative sense, it's really annoying that I have to clarify) incapable of doing anything other than expressing explicit detail. I'm sometimes capable of implicit detail, but not without extra explicit detail also.
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like if I labelled my chilli - or whatever substitute you're picturing - crock 'vegetarian medium hot', that would convey that whilst anyone could eat it, it would be of primary interest to people who liked moderate heat and eschewed the consumption of flesh/wanted to be 100% sure there was no beast they had made a vow not to eat in it (also that people with dairy/egg allergies should ask about the kitchen).
The problem that I'm having is that it
would get eaten. That's where the analogy fails. Personally I don't care who eats it, or in my case who plays my game(s), but the parallel is so far off that it totally ruins whatever it is you're trying to teach me.
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You're not going to literally kill anyone via food allergies by serving them a game that's completely not what they wanted by neglecting to divulge ingredients. However, you might kill their enthusiasm for trying indies, the genre, or TTRPGs in general: that's what people are protecting themselves from when they ask what's in the thing they don't know about compared to the one they do.
I mean it's not like I don't understand the impetus to protect oneself from uncertainties, but the problem that I have is that it never gets to them actually asking me what's in the game in a literal, direct manner and even if it did I don't have enough context to compare anything I write to any other tabletop RPG
literally because that's why I write RPGs. And where they've been comparable to video games in the past, I make a point of explicitly pointing that out (two of my games are literally titled [respective genre] World, one was literally described as the result of jacksepticeye playing Until Dawn, one was described as being inspired by a combination of the Criminal Sandbox video games that were out at the time, and the last a metacommentary on Hollywood, only on a budget)